Laid-back Mexican oasis offers art, eats and those palm trees

July 13, 2008|By Lauren Viera, TRIBUNE REPORTER

TODOS SANTOS, Mexico — Happening upon a cluster of palm trees in the middle of the Mexican desert is something of a novelty.

After driving for kilometer after barren kilometer across the dusty terrain of Baja California Sur, void of any signs of people or plant life (there are animals -- cows and goats -- who take their time crossing the road), Highway 19 suddenly rambles its way across the Tropic of Cancer and into a small town, where there are people, and there are a few desert-dwelling plants. And, refreshingly, there are palm trees. A whole grove of them, in fact.

Sprouting near them, as if they were dependent on one another, there is culture. And it's thriving.

Todos Santos is home to dozens of galleries and restaurants and little shops, seemingly displaced in the middle of the desert. There is music and night life; there are fliers tacked on stucco walls advertising a film festival taking place over the weekend, and tattered posters left from an art festival a few weeks back. There are locals and tourists mixing and mingling at a lazy, relaxed pace, pausing to make pleasantries with each other and admire the historic streets and sites around them.

All this lies about an hour's drive northwest of Cabo San Lucas, Baja Sur's premiere party town, where a Hard Rock Cafe is anchored to a neon landscape lined with chain resorts, overpriced restaurants catering to cruise ships and American amenities transplanted for comfort.

Needless to say, in this skinny sliver of Mexico, Todos Santos is an unexpected oasis of culture. Kind of like a palm tree in the middle of the desert.

It all started with Jesus. Or sugar.

Like many Mexican villages during the mid-18th Century, Todos Santos was descended upon by Jesuits to convert natives (at that time, the Pericu, Cochime, and Guaycuara tribes living in the foothills of the region's Sierra de la Laguna Mountains) to Christianity and spread the holy word through a system of missions lining the Baja peninsula.

Built in 1724 and named Nuestra Senora del Pilar, Todos Santos' mission still stands at the heart of the town. It was established to foster a farming community capitalizing on the area's surprisingly rich soil -- in particular, its ability to grow sugar cane.

Within a handful of years, Todos Santos' burgeoning religion was overshadowed by its agriculture. That lush, desert-dwelling palm grove visible from the highway was sprung from an aquifer buried just south of town, discovered in the late 1800s and tapped for large-scale production of sugar cane.

For decades, Todos Santos' sugar industry thrived. A half-dozen mills were established, and the wealthy families who ran them built mansions and haciendas here. But by the 1950s, exhausted from overuse, the aquifer dried up, taking the town along with it. Poverty settled in, and Todos Santos began to resemble the desert surrounding it. Other than a handful of villagers, only the palm grove and the buildings remained.

And then, after 30-odd years of self-replenishment, the aquifer's water began flowing here once again. And with it, artists started trickling in. They flowed in from the north via the newly constructed Highway 19, whose two lanes were paved straight through the town in 1984.

Attracted to the sleepy village (and, likely, its impoverished state and cheap cost of living), artists began migrating from the southwestern United States and mainland Mexico. Studios, galleries and collectives were established. Commerce and tourists followed, almost in tandem with one another. An artists' colony was born.

People aren't the only ones drawn by Todos Santos' spring-fed palm grove. The whales, los ballenas, are wise to it too.

Gray whales so love the sweet water fed into the Pacific Ocean by the grove's lagoons, they make it a point to stop here every winter, to graze and bathe. From late January to early March, they come to swim as close to that warm, sweet water as they can, nuzzling right up to the sand bar on the stretch of coast between Playa San Pedrito and Playa La Cachora. They're so close to the shore, you can see and hear their sprays over the roar of the ocean.

Todos Santos has never been marketed as a whale-watching destination -- which, of course, makes it even more ideal for doing just that. One can drive on a dirt road to an isolated beach and sit on the sand and see 4, 5, 10, 12 whales in an hour, the mist produced by their sprays wafting all the way back to the beach.

Whales are reason enough to come here. But the real draw is the art.

There are more than two dozen galleries in this small town of 4,500 residents -- a significant number of whom are expatriates who came here as visitors and never left. There are painting and drawing studios; there are craftsmen and women specializing in ceramics and tile. There are gallery walks; there are open houses, and there's a huge eponymous arts festival that's taken place here every February for the last 11 years.